When I was in Canada last week, I visited two provincial government organizations that offered two intriguing examples of how social media are challenging their IT organizations.

The first organization comes from the merger of two previously distinct organizations. We were discussing the concept of employee-centricity and the role that employees can play on social networks. We went through a number of examples in their domain from other jurisdictions. Of course what is essential for those virtuous examples is that employees are allowed to access social media from their workplace.

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The second conversation was with the CIO of another provincial agency, with whom I was discussing the case of “rogue” 2.0 development by some users. One particular example was the decision by an individual to start using an external wiki to support the need for collaboration that he felt inside his department. The CIO told me that they had to shut it down, since internal policies prevent people from discussing work-related matters on external platforms.

I foresee a lot of bright and impassioned people with Web 2.0 savvy leaving government next year because of two factors:

1) an improving economy with lots of job openings for people who understand the social networking world, and

2) agency management that still doesn’t get what Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 means for their agency and are clinging desperately to their life rafts of Gov 1.0 policies.

Thus, the folks you will have left are not going to be familiar with Gov 2.0 tech and thus Open Gov and Gov 2.0 will sputter to a stop or just limp along always being five years behind the current practices. I feel the chance for government to take the lead is quickly slipping away.